My initial response is "Hah, fuck you." But the pictures he posted don't LOOK fake and the names on the picture seem to check out. I figure, let GAF decide. So I rehosted them and am placing them here.

Each building is approximately 1000 triangles. The rubble bases at the bottom were created to be interchangable between buildings with the same footprint. I art-directed the concept artist and then modeled and UVed the assets pictured before passing them to a texture artist. Once the texture work was completed, I art teched the assets for use with the game engine. I then placed the buildings using Factor 5s proprietary level design tool.

These are in-progress assets created for a Wii flight action game. The cargo plane was part of the parachute player activity and needed to be a visually interesting space for the player to jump out from.

There was a business flyer in which it was stated that they had a Wii title in development which was going to be published by Nintendo. However, it is true that this flying project has no publisher as of July.
WhiteHarvest also appears to have closed down during that month.

@toneroni
Factor 5 Germany is still trying to find a publisher...but it went all downhill when their EA project (Brütal Legend according to a blog) was cancelled in July. Could you give some more information about the project though?

I assume that White Harvest worked on the project when they also worked on the EA port. When that was cancelled they could no longer support development of this flight game and the studio layed off most - if not all - of their employees.

Member

Does anyone still have the Pilotwings Wii article which was published on the Game Informer website last April? From what I remember it fits pretty well into what we know about this Factor 5 flight title.

Banned

Banned

Those art assets are really starved for geometry. Too primitive to be the work of Factor 5. The Rogue Squadron games had ships which were quite a bit more detailed, some made up of many thousands of polygons.

Mrgrgr

Those art assets are really starved for geometry. Too primitive to be the work of Factor 5. The Rogue Squadron games had ships which were quite a bit more detailed, some made up of many thousands of polygons.

Games go through a revision based process, and the art assets are part of that. A simplistic model may be used at the start of the project to give a feel for the world and allow them to test the gameplay, whereas at the end of the project, the model may look so much better it is barely recognizable to the original.

While these might not be the work of Factor 5, they do say prototype, so we probably shouldn't judge their legitimacy based upon the model quality of a finished game.

Member

Those art assets are really starved for geometry. Too primitive to be the work of Factor 5. The Rogue Squadron games had ships which were quite a bit more detailed, some made up of many thousands of polygons.

Banned

Games go through a revision based process, and the art assets are part of that. A simplistic model may be used at the start of the project to give a feel for the world and allow them to test the gameplay, whereas at the end of the project, the model may look so much better it is barely recognizable to the original.

While these might not be the work of Factor 5, they do say prototype, so we probably shouldn't judge their legitimacy based upon the model quality of a finished game.

Member

Doesn't really look like Pilotwings -- was that ever anything more than a rumor? Maybe this was a different game.

It's a cool style though. The characters seem kinda out of place, but the building and plane concepts look like they'd make an interesting setting for a flight game.

Nirolak said:

Generally prototypes don't have extremely high amounts of polygons.

Games go through a revision based process, and the art assets are part of that. A simplistic model may be used at the start of the project to give a feel for the world and allow them to test the gameplay, whereas at the end of the project, the model may look so much better it is barely recognizable to the original.

While these might not be the work of Factor 5, they do say prototype, so we probably shouldn't judge their legitimacy based upon the model quality of a finished game.

That, and I wouldn't expect a game with that art style to be pushing hardware in the same way as Rogue Squadron or Lair. Factor 5 got burned badly with their last expensive game, so it wouldn't surprise me to see them scale things back pretty dramatically.